County First to Allow Electronic Transmission of Property Documents

SANTA ANA —  County government took a big step into the electronic age Monday when the Orange County clerk-recorder’s office became the first agency of its kind in the nation to allow title companies to transmit important property documents, like deeds of trust, electronically.

“Instead of sending us the papers, they scan the image and send it over a dedicated line to us,” said Gary L. Granville, county clerk-recorder. Once the documents are examined and recorded, a confirmation message is sent to the title company, and the information is stored on a CD-ROM disk. The title company sends the originals back to the buyer.

This new program is expected to speed escrow closings and reduce the amount of time it takes to correct mistakes in title documents. Title company officials say that it will also save them the cost of transporting the documents via messenger.

Already, four title companies are participating in the new program, which requires an $8,000 to $10,000 investment in software and equipment as well as a dedicated phone line: Orange Coast Title Co., Fidelity National Title Insurance Co., First American Title Insurance Co. and Chicago Title Insurance Co. Four other companies also have asked to be included in the program, Granville said.

The system, developed by Data Tree Corp. of San Diego, cost the county $700,000, which it paid for by assessing an extra fee for property filings. Data Tree landed the job after bidding on an imaging project for the county last year.

“What it’s going to do is save people time,” said Tom Gibbins of Fidelity National in Irvine. For instance, Gibbins said, if a home buyer is slated to close on a house on Friday, electronic filing could eliminate the chance that he will have to wait over the weekend for the county confirmation needed to pick up the keys.

There will be no additional cost for filing electronically. In fact, Granville said, in the long run it could lead to a reduction in fees.

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Title documents are now processed in large batches, taking anywhere from a few hours to a full day for examiners to process and record the transactions. Gibbins said that, in tests of the new system, confirmation came back in as little as 10 to 30 minutes, although he said he expects that to change as the number of people using the system increases.

To implement the new program, Granville had to lobby the state Legislature last September to allow digitized signatures in title documents to be given the same validity as handwritten signatures. Two counties in California are allowed to use these electronic documents, Orange and San Bernardino. However, San Bernardino has yet to adopt the program.

Granville believes that some counties may be reluctant to implement the program over fear that document images can be altered or lost. However, he said the new electronic filings are backed up nightly on CD-ROMs and a security code is assigned to each user of the new system.